by Oren Dorell, USA TODAY

by Oren Dorell, USA TODAY

The USA leads the world in gun ownership, but it's our individualistic culture that puts us at greater risk of mass shootings compared with other countries where guns are prevalent, according to a British criminologist who has studied gun violence in different nations.

Mass shooters in any nation tend to be loners with not much social support who strike out at their communities, schools and families, says Peter Squires of the University of Brighton in the United Kingdom, who has studied mass shootings in his own country, the United States and Europe.

Many other countries where gun ownership is high, such as Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Israel, however, tend to have more tight-knit societies where a strong social bond supports people through crises, and mass killings are fewer, Squires said.

"In a sense they're less private" than in the USA, "but privacy and individualism is where some of the causes of crime and revenge can be found," he said.

"What stops crime above all is informal social controls," he says. "Close-knit societies where people are supported, where their mood swings are appreciated, where if someone starts to go off the rails it's noted, where you tend to intervene, where there's more support."

Squires favors controls on gun ownership but says there's more to mass killings than the prevalence of guns.

There are far more guns in private hands in the USA than in any other country, according to the latest Small Arms Survey conducted in 2007 by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. On average, the survey reported 88.8 guns per 100 people in the USA, compared with 54.8 per 100 residents in Yemen and 45.7 per 100 in Switzerland.

Israel, where many men and women openly carry firearms while carrying out day-to-day activities, was ranked 79 out of 178 countries on the list, but non-political mass killings there are unheard of.

To be sure, shooting rampages have occurred in the past 20 years in Germany, Norway, Finland, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, but not as many as in the USA.

Before Adam Lanza walked into an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., and shot to death 20 children, six adults and then himself, Scotland was home to the worst-ever non-political shooting rampage in a public school. (There have been worse shootings that were terrorist-related.)

A gunman armed with four handguns killed 16 kindergartners, one adult and himself in the Dumblane school massacre in 1996. Before that, a man armed with two rifles and a handgun killed 16 people in Hungerford, England, in 1987, before killing himself.

"All of the shooters who perpetrated rampages in Britain were loners, people with grudges, angry men," Squires said. "In close-knit societies, they may have been picked up persuaded or consoled before they got to the breaking point."

Squires says Europeans in countries with a lot of guns also tend to have a different relationship with firearms. In Switzerland, for example, males who complete compulsory military service are allowed to keep assault rifles at home, with ammunition in sealed containers that are only supposed to be opened under orders.

"It's part of a highly disciplines militarized training program," Squires said. "It's not going to the corner pawn shop and picking up what's there" like one can do in the USA.

Scandinavian countries are affluent, with small population and little immigration, and thus more stable than the USA. They have hunting cultures where people own shotguns and rifles but few handguns.

After Anders Breivik killed 77 people in Norway last year, Norwegians viewed the slaying as the product of "one person's mental aberration" and his actions have not resulted in changes to Norway's gun culture because Norway doesn't have a significant gun-crime problem, Squires says.

The Breivik rampage and mass killings in Finland, Germany and Switzerland were "treated like national disasters, fires or major crashes rather than crimes," Squires said. "Because Norway and Finland and Switzerland don't have huge incidents of gun crime -- they're generally regarded as among the safest of European countries as far as crime."